eJournals Kodikas/Code 38/3-4

Kodikas/Code
0171-0834
2941-0835
Narr Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Linguistic practices allow speakers to draw distinctions, recognize contrasts and establish boundaries. But under some circumstances, linguistic practices also allow speakers to suspend the points of reference around which those distinctions are drawn, so that contrasts and boundaries otherwise salient in public and private discourse are now obscured. These linguistic acts are often described as forms of politeness. But when the topic in question is considered taboo, the discursive practices become more complex, sometimes suspending the expectations of taboo'd speech, sometimes developing ways to retain the authority of taboo while allowing the formerly forbidden topic to become (momentarily) suitable for public discussion. This paper explores some examples of these discourse and taboo benefit from an intersectionalities framework, e.g. an analysis that shows how taboo-related discursive practices are reflected and refracted against social and historical inequalities.
2015
383-4

Language, Sexuality and the Suspension of Taboo

2015
William L. Leap
K O D I K A S / C O D E Ars Semeiotica Volume 38 (2015) · No. 3-4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Language, Sexuality and the Suspension of Taboo: Lessons from “Gay English” 1 William L. Leap (Washington D. C.) Linguistic practices allow speakers to draw distinctions, recognize contrasts and establish boundaries. But under some circumstances, linguistic practices also allow speakers to suspend the points of reference around which those distinctions are drawn, so that contrasts and boundaries otherwise salient in public and private discourse are now obscured. These linguistic acts are often described as forms of politeness. But when the topic in question is considered taboo, the discursive practices become more complex, sometimes suspending the expectations of taboo’d speech, sometimes developing ways to retain the authority of taboo while allowing the formerly forbidden topic to become (momentarily) suitable for public discussion. This paper explores some examples of these discursive practices and their effects on taboo’d speech. The analysis shows how discussions of discourse and taboo benefit from an intersectionalities framework, e. g. an analysis that shows how taboo-related discursive practices are reflected and refracted against social and historical inequalities. 1 Introduction Language and sexuality studies cover a broad range of topics and interests, but at some stage of the inquiry, studies of language and sexuality are likely to become studies of language and taboo. The complexities of sexuality itself make this outcome almost inevitable. If we think about gender as the ideological expectations associated with “who men and women are” (and admittedly, defining gender in terms of “men” and “women” is an ideological assumption! ), then sexuality designates those psychological, affective and social formations like desire, imagination, comradery, affection, filiation, transgression, and terror through which people comply with, talk back to, and/ or refuse gender’s ideological demands. More complex than claims to identity (“straight”, “gay”, “queer”) or forms of erotic practice, sexuality identifies a range of practices through which gendered authority becomes validated or contested including practices that are forbidden, foreclosed, or proscribed - practices commonly labeled taboo. 1 My thanks to Mie Hirimoto, Lucy Jones, Helen Sauntson, Denis Provencher, David Peterson, and Brian Adams-Thies for their comments on earlier iterations of this essay. 2 Defining Taboo Fleming and Lempert (2011) suggest that taboo indicates those things that “ought not to be said” or otherwise publically acknowledged, even if those things are very much a part of the speakers’ everyday lives (2011: 5.) But a linguistic analysis of taboo does not end with an inventory of topics or the words and phrases that designate them. Allan and Burridge (2006) explain: [. . .] Taboos arise out of social constraints on the individual’s behavior where it can cause discomfort, harm or injury. [. . .] Even an unintended contravention of taboo risks condemnation and censure; generally, people can and do avoid tabooed behavior unless they intend to violate a taboo (2006: 1.) They continue: Taboo and the consequent censoring of language motivate language change by promoting the creation of highly inventive and often playful new expressions, or new meanings for old expressions [. . .]” (2006: 2.) Irvine (2011) agrees. There may be “topics and words that local conventions brand as unmentionable,” yet “people find ways to communicate [. . .] mentioning or implicating the unmentionable without actually breaching the norms that make that material obnoxious” (2011: 15.) Studies exploring the audience reception of gay pornography demonstrate how sexual subjects engage “the unmentionable” in linguistic practice. (Adams-Thies 2012, 2015, Leap 2010 c, 2015 b, Mercer 2012.) If taboo simply indicated things that “ought not to be said” (in Fleming’s and Lempert’s sense), viewers of gay porn would likely avoid references to “obnoxious” materials (e. g. father/ son incest, male rape, fisting, bondage and torture) when they discuss experiences of audience reception with other viewers or when they post comments about a favorite gay porn scene on-line. And some viewers do avoid mentioning such scenes, while foregrounding other areas of the storyline in their face-to-face or on-line commentaries. But some viewers do include references to scenes with “obnoxious” material in their commentary. Some viewers rewrite the storyline and diffuse the impact of the “obnoxious” material, e. g. father and son incest becomes recast as intergenerational sex or sex between friends. Some viewers submerge the “obnoxious” material beneath more appealing descriptors, e. g. “Incest? That’s hot! ” And some viewers simply refer to such a scene in generic terms, e. g. the two men had sex, while avoiding reference to any forms of irregularity (See discussion in Leap 2010 c: 258-260.). Apparently, references to taboo do more than position unmentionable references within spaces of linguistic creativity. The unmentionable - the obnoxious material - becomes positioned variably, not uniformly in the emerging discourse. And that positioning reflects the intersections between of speaker-centered and contextual features which regularly appear in studies of other forms of gendered/ sexual discourse (Abe 2011, Jones 2010, Motschenbacher 2012, Provencher 2016), e. g. social/ class position, racial/ ethnic background, age, nationality and citizenship, gendered identity, desire and (be)longing. Applied to studies of language, sexuality and taboo, discourses of taboo’d sexuality cease to unfold as a categorical prohibition and become instead a domain where regulatory practices unfold with variable Language, Sexuality and the Suspension of Taboo 247 effects. I explore the social significance of those variable effects in a set of examples from my studies of language and sexuality - same-sex identified women’s narratives of violence and avoidance, specifically - in metropolitan Cape Town’s Black townships in the late 1990s. 3 Background: Intersectionality Interests in intersectionality grew out of concerns of Feminist Scholars of Color (and later, queer scholars of color, as well) that “Women’s Studies” (and Gender/ Sexuality Studies in general) overplayed discussions of gender differences, while ignoring other social components that also impacted the texture of many women’s lives. 2 Crenshaw explains, in a now classic statement: [. . .] many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as the boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately (1991, 1244). Yuval-Davis agrees: Being oppressed [. . .] “as a Black person” is always constructed and intermeshed in other social divisions (for example, gender, social class, disability status, sexuality, age, nationality, immigration status, geography, etc.) (Yuval-Davis 2006, 195). Nash adds an important caveat: It is not enough just to inventory the details that constitute the intersection. If intersectionality is solely an anti-exclusion tool designed to describe “the multiplier effect” or “the lifelong spirit injury of black women” then it is incumbent upon both feminist theory and antiracist work to develop a conceptualization of identity that captures the ways in which race, gender, sexuality and class, among other categories are produced through each other, securing both privilege and oppression simultaneously (Nash 2008, 10, citing Wing 1990, 191). Nash’s commentary is especially relevant to a discussion of a regulatory device like taboo, where distinctions between acceptable and forbidden forms of reference have profound implications for enumeration and maintenance of privilege - and oppression. The following sections of this paper discuss a sets of examples where the discursive practices associated with taboo engaged such an enumeration and maintenance of privilege: referencing personal sexual identity in instances where linguistic etiquette treats such identifications as “taboo.” 2 Leap (2015 a) review recent work in intersectionality theory and its relevance for language and sexuality studies and queer sociolinguistics. 248 William L. Leap (Washington D. C.) 4 Black Townships and Xhosa Sexual Discourse in Metropolitan Capetown, 1995-1999 4.1 Location The general context for this discussion is metropolitan Capetown, South Africa; the time frame is the late 1990 s, when the government of reconciliation was replacing years of apartheid rule. 3 The primary location for the events described here is the Black townships, the communities located to the east of Capetown’s City Centre which were “proclaimed” as sites of Black-only residence under apartheid rule. 4 Residents of Black townships are primarily Xhosa identified, tracing family and kin to the homelands in the Elizabethtown area of the Eastern Cape Province. Township residents themselves either relocated, either voluntarily or by force, from the homelands to the Cape Town area (Western Cape Province), or are the children or grandchildren of those who relocated. 4.2 Southern Nguni Sexual Discourse; Taboo The primarily language of the homeland is Xhosa, a member of the Southern Nguni (Bantu) language family. Varieties of Xhosa are widely spoken in Capetown’s Black townships and so several varieties of English. Certain varieties of English are closely associated with the City Centre, the geographic site of power under apartheid rule. Afrikaans, also spoken in the townships and the City Centre, was identified even more closely with the Apartheid regime, and it factors into this discussion in specific ways, as we will see. The taboo’d feature that I want to discuss stems from homeland discursive practice, although it is attested elsewhere in Southern Nguni and is in no sense unique to Xhosa linguistic tradition (Irvine 1992, kendall 1999, Rudwick 2008.) The feature involves obligatory linguistic demonstrations of respect to elders, in-laws and other significant kinspersons. Additionally, certain words and word-references are taboo’d: words that sound like or resemble the meaning of the name of the persons to be respected, for example. In addition, certain topics are taboo’d, especially so, public discussions related to sexual themes, especially in front of those to be treated with respect - or in front of strangers. These restrictions on naming and topic do not inhibit participation in erotic activity or limit the construction of a vibrantly phrased textual practice within the erotic moment. Sexuality is always a system of social action and Southern Nguni people are not prudish when it comes to sexual things. But when asked to comment on discursive practices related to that system, southern Nguni people are as likely to employ forms of indirect referencing (which, to an outsider’s ear, might appear to be acts of avoidance or denial or avoidance) or through one or more of the linguistic formats outlined below. Similarly, southern Nguni people expect the same modes of behavior from others - at least, from those who wish to display the appropriate indications of deference and respect to Nguni tradition and to those who embody those traditions in the current moment. 3 I conducted this research while teaching in the Theory of Rhetoric Programme at the University of Cape Town and under the sponsorship of the Triangle Project, an AIDS activist organization based in Salt River and Guguletu Township. My thanks to the Programme, and especially to my research colleagues at the Triangle Project, for making this project research possible. 4 Some of the Black townships pre-date apartheid. They were labor camps for Black workers brought to the Cape Town area from the homelands under short-term labor contracts. See below. Language, Sexuality and the Suspension of Taboo 249 Adopting these techniques of linguistic avoidance and deferral does more than enable speakers to display the appropriate stance of respect. The language of respect is also a language that avoids inappropriate reference, a language that allows the speaker to avoid becoming the focus of attention in discursive practice, and thereby a language that maintains personal modesty. Language use becomes a power vehicle for demonstrating these commitments to place within southern Nguni tradition and, thereby, for reaffirming cultural and linguistic citizenship. 5 4.3 Appropriate Discursive References Through Linguistic Practice As is true for all Southern Nguni languages, Xhosa provides speakers with a range of linguistic strategies for constructing alternative discursive materials in instances where words or word-references must be avoided, or entire topics are interdicted. They range from rearranging phonological and morphemic details so that otherwise familiar Xhosa terms are rendered unfamiliar and thereby no longer obnoxious, to constructing word substitutions by borrowing vocabulary from adjacent languages -! San, Zulu and more recently, Afrikaans and English. So speakers are not denied access to creativity and the structural/ historical detail of Xhosa bears witness to the cumulative results of those practices (Herbert 1990.) Township Xhosa maintains these practices of linguistic respect/ avoidance “taboo” in various ways, one of which is the insistence that there is no Xhosa term that “names” someone who identifies as a homosexual. Under this respect system, there should not be: the explicitness of sexual identity would not be named, nor would it need to be. When I asked Cape Town area Black township residents about terms for “homosexual” in township based discourse, some respondents volunteered: isi tabane (which the township residents I spoke with consistently agreed was “a Zulu word”, not something indigenous to Xhosa; some cited moffie, an Afrikaans term identifying who was effeminate, unmarried, or in some other sense characteristically not-masculine; and some cited gay and lesbian. Queer was not in circulation in the townships in 1995-1999.) Some respondents alluded to terms that could only be said privately, between close friends or intimates, but were not appropriate for public use especially in the presence of outsiders. And some respondents indicated that sexual identities were not named, but were confirmed through certain forms of action. 5 Intersectionalities of Gay English For township residents to tell me that they could use these terms or purposes of identification - or that they would avoid using terminology when faced with such tasks - was not the same thing as telling when they used these options, or telling me whether (and why) certain township residents preferred certain options over others. Long-standing Nguni practices of appropriate and taboo’d speech were shaping linguistic diversity here, but so do the availability of City Centre-identified, gay-identified varieties of English. 5 The respect and avoidance practices are closely associated with “women’s speech”, but men as well as women are bound by these discursive obligations, even if women may become powerfully disadvantaged by them (Rudwick 2008: 240-243). 250 William L. Leap (Washington D. C.) One set of those varieties of English relevant to this example includes discursive practices that I have elsewhere referred to as“Gay English” (Leap 2008 a), a broadly inclusive designation for certain relationships between language and same-sex desire, identities and practices in English-speaking settings. Particularly important is its ideological potency: people believe Gay English exists, even if there is no agreement regarding the details of the linguistic inventory through which conditions of existence are represented. Indeed, like all forms of linguistic practice, Gay English in the North Atlantic context is an intersectional formation, inflected for gender, age, class division, regional, racial and ethnic difference, and particulars of desire and erotic practice; and increasingly, in the US, Gay English is being inflected against nationality and national language background, as well (Leap 2008 b.) And thanks to various forms of global circulation (including the gay tourism industry, displacement/ diasporic movement, electronic communication/ social media, and world-wide initiatives around sexuality and human rights) Gay English has now taken root in a wide range of sites outside of the US- European domain (Leap 2010 a). Understandably, the intersectional profiles differ in these instances and so do the ideological values associated with Gay English, especially in relation to local forms of discourse that already engage forms of same-sex desire. Perhaps because of its modernist associations, Gay English is now designated the “appropriate” language of same-sex desire in many locations within the global circuit. In cases where existing linguistic/ sexual taboos impose severe restrictions on local social practices, a globally circulating gay English provides especially attractive alternatives to local practice and local restrictions, and sometimes provides discursive materials that would otherwise not be available in the local setting. But this is not the case in every location where gay English is attested (Leap 2010 a.) In contexts as different as contemporary France (Provencher 2007) and contemporary Indonesia (Blackwood 2010, Boellstorff 2002), the “outsider” status of gay English works as a disadvantage rather than as an asset. Already marked as something that has no appropriate place within the local terrain, the expressive potential of gay English is best avoided in favor of forms of linguistic practice more closely tied to particulars of the social and historical context since those linguistic practices confirm a speaker’s claims to place within community, region and/ or nation. North Atlantic-related Gay English circulated in metropolitan Cape Town during the apartheid period, due to such factors as international travel, tourism (including sex tourism), and the distributions of print and visual media (including pornography.) A major point of circulation was the City Centre, Cape Town’s commercial and administrative district (including the Houses of Parliament and government offices), and also the site of most of Cape Town’s gay-identified/ gay-friendly pubs and public cruising areas. However, language use in the gay pubs and clubs during the apartheid period was largely Afrikaans-based. Not until the 1990 s, when apartheid was regulations were beginning to be disbanded, did English began to upstage Afrikaans as the language of public gay identity in these locations. It was also during the 1990 s that same-sex identified residents of the Black townships began to gain access to City Centre gay-identified sites, and with that, access to what was now a City-Center identified gay English. Similar to Afrikaans, and unlike Xhosa, the English used in these locations did not assign negative sanctions to explicit, public discussions of sexuality. But unlike Afrikaans, English did not bring into the conversations any association with apartheid rule (or, and later, invoke references to apartheid legacies.) Moreover, gay English promoted affiliations between Black township residents and the North Atlantic gay metropolis and its sense of gay style, and that helped build forms of gay imaginary within the townships. Language, Sexuality and the Suspension of Taboo 251 While these varieties of gay English offered powerful alternatives to existing linguistic practices, they also indexed an affiliation with Cape Town’s City Centre, an area proclaimed as white-spaces and as spaces of Black exclusion under apartheid, and an area of white privilege during the period of reconciliation, especially so where gay commercial locations were concerned (Leap 2005.) Viewed ideologically, and without taking into account the sexual messages, speaking a gay-identified English asserted affiliations with whiteness/ privilege and thereby a refusal of township/ homeland/ Xhosa traditions. Moreover, the sexual (and other) explicitness of gay English violated Xhosa’s expectations of respectful, restrained speech, identifying the speaker as someone who (at best) was ill-mannered and open to more severe reprimand - and at worst as someone who showing little respect for one area of Xhosa discursive traditions, might be willfully violating other traditions as well. Either way, framed in terms of township discourse, this would be taboo’d (or potentially taboo-able) behavior, indeed. 6 “[. . .] Mentioning [. . .] the Unmentionable without Actually Breaching the Norms” in Relation to Black Township Spatial Practice 6.1 Township Shebeens as Sites of “Humiliation and Harassment” The women and men I worked with during my Black township research (see footnote 3) were residents of Guguletu township, although some of them stayed in apartments or rented rooms in Salt River or one of Cape Town’s other southern suburbs during the work-week, and returned to stay with family or friends in Guguletu on the weekend. Place of residence was often a matter of convenience for those who had secured employment in the City Centre or adjacent areas. By staying in Salt River or other suburban locations during the week, workers avoided a long, tedious daily train ride/ commute from township to City Centre and return. (Such options had been highly restricted, if not impossible, during the apartheid period.) But there were other reasons for moving to the suburbs. Tando and other Black township residents that I interviewed repeatedly agreed that the City Centre offered a way to escape what one same-sex identified Black man termed “[. . .] this situation [in the townships] of humiliation and harassment and all that stuff.” (cited in Leap 2005: 254.) Same sex identified women and men became targets of “humiliation and harassment” any time they moved within the public space of the township. These ever-present threats prompted some of these township residents to seek lodgings elsewhere or encouraged them to travel to City Centre to find sources for socializing in the bars or in other locations if they maintained residence in the townships. There were sites within the townships where same-sex identified women and men could socialize, however. One of the key locations to that end were the shebeens, privately operated taverns, located in a person’s home, offering drinks and snacks at inexpensive prices, and also places for dancing, to play pool and card games, to meet friends and to socialize. More than merely for profit commercial sites, shebeens were locations where people gathered, where social networks were broadened, and were existing ties of friendship and kinship could be acknowledged, reaffirmed and renewed. Tando (and others) admitted that shebeens could also be sites of “humiliation and harassment.” Those who frequented the shebeens did the same, but they also described how 252 William L. Leap (Washington D. C.) they engaged those conditions as part of the shebeen-centered work of friendship and kinship. These descriptions - and the real life experiences they detail - are of particular interest in this paper. While they engage conditions of shebeen-related humiliation and harassment, they do so while engaging practices ordinarily considered to be taboo under southern Nguni linguistic and social etiquette: references to the names of deceased relatives, narrative singularity, and explicit affirmations of personal sexuality and the sexuality of others. That same-sex identified Black township residents might suspend the regulatory expectations of taboo when they describe responses to humiliation and harassment in the shebeen makes an important point: some narrative practices may be able to qualify the potency of taboo, in much the same way that some narrative practices are found to reshape the severity of homophobic violence into speaker affirmations of self-determination, survival and triumph (Leap 2010 b.) More importantly, perhaps, speakers did not suspend the potency of taboo in identical ways, and it is here that the presence of a North Atlantic/ City Centre related Gay English along with other linguistic options becomes especially relevant to the discussion. 6.2 Two Women Address Shebeen-related “Humiliation and Harassment” - and Taboo To develop this argument, I am citing here segments from interviews conducted with samesex identified women who have long-standing family and friendship-based affiliations with Guguletu, a Black township located eighteen miles east of Capetown’s City Centre. Both women were in their mid-twenties at the time of the interviews (1998); the language of the interview in each case was English. Both women are fluent speakers of Xhosa (the language of their childhood home) and Babs chose to answer some questions and to tell some of her personal stories in that language, which we reviewed, transcribed and translated together, at a later time. Theodora, the speaker in Example 1, grew up in Guguletu but now stays 6 in one of the suburbs; she works in the City Centre during the week and returns to Guguletu on the weekends. Babs also grew up in Guguletu and also tried suburban life briefly. But Babs was unable to find stable employment in the City Centre and she also missed the familiar ambiance of the township setting. Two months after moving into the suburbs, she returned to Guguletu. Theodora and Babs offered these comments (Examples 1 and 2, below) as part of a larger discussion of township geography, “safe space” locations and locations associated with threats and violence. Having already explained that the shebeens were unsafe for same-sex identified women and men, now the women told me that the shebeens were important sites for social networking. The shift in evaluation surprised me, and I asked for clarification. Examples 1 and 2 indicate how Theodora and Babs replied to my request. 7 6 “Stays” is the appropriate Township English usage for this reference. “Stays” denotes temporary location; “lives” denotes a permanent place of residence. Someone “stays” in Guguletu or Salt River; whereas they “live” is the ancestral village in the homeland. 7 Leap (2015 b: 673-676) complements the following discussion with a close review of the formal properties of these comments. Language, Sexuality and the Suspension of Taboo 253 Example 1: [. . .] it is just the straight people who have problems with us. 101 Theodora: Like, we go to [names one shebeen] as lesbians or as people. I’ll go with my 102 friends, We go there and we relax. There are those people who are against us, but because 103 the owner knows us we don’t have any funny reactions. We aren’t against the other 104 people who are drinking there. It is just the straight people who have problems with us. 105 And it is a nice, cool, place, positive place, no problem. Then we leave [names shebeen], 106 and go straight through a grave yard we go to Nyanga East. In Nyanga East we go to 107 [name] Tavern. Even at [name] tavern, we have problems. We had problems with those 108 straight people. They are against us lesbians but there is no response that we do to the 109 straight people. We go and report to the owner of the place. If the owner doesn’t like 110 what is happening, the owner will tell the straight people to leave or we lesbians will 111 leave that place. And we leave Nyanga East and we go to Crossroads. Source: (Leap 2015 b: 637.) Example 2: Your safety is in your hands. 201 Babs: OK. There is this one shebeen, it’s not safe because there’s a lot of skolies, 202 gangsters, children you know. But we discovered another one down the road here. And 203 that’s like, you come in you buy your liquor, you sit down, you drink, you jive, and you 204 drink your liquor, finish it and you go home. Every kind of people is there. Your safety is 205 in your hands. It is up to you. Are you going to drink and be rude? Disturb other people’s 206 company? Because once I pinch you then it’s like a heck of an argument. So you buy 207 your liquor and enjoy yourself, don’t disturb other people. That is why I say, your safety 208 is in your hands. Source: (Leap 2015 b: 673-674.) In the first instance, Theodora’s and Babs’ comments reflect two different approaches to what de Certeau termed “walking the city” (1984: 92-93.) These are “travel stories,” in de Certeau’s phrasing (1984: 115), and both travel stories involve township shebeens, sites where, by their description, these women often become the objects of an unnamed (but given the indications of sexual sameness, presumably heteronormative male) gaze. The specifics of what de Certeau terms the “spatial syntax” (1984: 115) in each speaker’s travel story” (1984: 115) indicate how the speaker and her friends construct personal safety in the midst of conditions of risk and danger. Importantly to the interests of this paper, the particulars of spatial syntax and the indications of safety are in no sense the same. Theodora (Example 1) talks about moving from site to site, especially when “we had problems with those straight people [in a particular shebeen] who are against us lesbians” (lines 1.107-1.108), Babs (Example 2) talks about selecting a single site and settling there for the entire evening. Theodora explains that she and her friends are very much dependent on the patronage of the shebeen’s owner (1.103). If there are problems with other customers 254 William L. Leap (Washington D. C.) (1.107), then “we go and report to the owner of the place. If the owner doesn’t like what is happening, the owner will tell the straight people to leave or we lesbians will leave that place” (1.110-1.111.) Babs’ source of protection is not the owner’s patronage but rests in the fact that “your safety is in your hands”, a comment she introduces twice into the commentary (2.204- 2.205, 2.207-2.208), along with her citation of the rhetorical anecdote reminding her listener that to create trouble is bring unwanted attention (2.205-2.206.) And the speaker’s use of nomination within the story line - specifically the speaker’s selfidentification and the identification of others - strengthens that argument that Theodora and Babs are not telling the same “travel story” even though they are both talking about visiting the township shebeens. Theodora specifies the connections between violence and sexuality, by naming “us” as “lesbians” and by naming the opponents as “straight people”, e. g.: “[. . .] it is just the straight people who have problems with us [. . .] They are against us lesbians [. . .]” (1.104, 1.108.) By maintaining this labeling throughout the commentary, Theodora’s creates an oppositional tension - us/ lesbians vs. them/ straight people - that organizes her entire descriptions of weekend township experience. (Township gay men play no role in the account at all.) For example, Theodora goes on to speak repeatedly about time spent in the homes of friends or in other spaces entirely divorced from the public/ heteronormative gaze. Visits to the shebeens, as important as they are to the work of friendship and kinship, are an augment to whatever social ties are developed in private settings. But more reliably than the shebeens, it is these spaces “inside” that provide Theodora and her friends with protection from “[. . .] the straight people who have problems with us” (1.105.) Borrowing another Township English metaphor these are the spaces in the township where (by Theodora’s report) she and her friends can “feel free.” This is not the stance of nomination - or the argument localizing the sites for “feeling free” - that Babs adopts in her commentary. Rather than attempting to specify a consistent identification for her participants, Babs refers to herself and her colleagues through a series of deictic (pronoun) pairings, and then through shifts in those pairings. What begins as “we” (2.201-2.202) dissolves into a “you” centered comradeship (lines 2.203-2.206) and a cautionary “I”-centered source of disruptive violence (2.206.) However, the “violent I” of 2.206 is not the “evaluative I” which restores the voice of the narrator to the text in 2.207, but is still distinct from “you”-nominated comradeship. As I explain in Leap (2015 b), Babs uses shifts in deictic marking to distinguish those moments where she places herself within the story line, as participant (“we”) or as the source of disruption “I” separated from “you” vs. outside of the story line, as narrator “I.” Overlooked in this complicated use of double-voicing nominating her own gender or sexuality or that of her friends or any other participant in the story-line. I can bring some of these details to the narrative, given that Babs told this story during a face-to-face conversation, which allowed me to assess her self-presentation at first-hand. And also, its specifics notwithstanding, Babs’ story retains the “order of discourse” broadly associated with the shebeen-related travel stories often told by same-sex identified Black township females. But in both cases, this would be information that I, as audience, bring into the narrative moment, Babs did not provide textual materials specifying the basis for those inferences. Unlike Theodora, Babs did not use the term “lesbian” to refer to herself or her women friends in relation to township-centered public/ commercial spaces. Language, Sexuality and the Suspension of Taboo 255 These contrasts in spatial syntax - movement, management of safety/ risk, self-reference, nominations of others - could be entirely accidental, of course. But viewed within an intersectional framework, these contrasts align with other contrasts distinguishing spatialstory-telling in Theodora’s and Bab’s examples. Importantly here is the difference in English register: Theodora’s English resembles the English of Cape Town’s City Centre - and specifically, given its repeated use of English rather than Afrikaans to connect identity, agency and desire - a City Centre-identified gay English practice. Babs’ English was not a City- Centre identified formation. In fact, some City Centre residents might have treated the recurring uses of deictic shift in Babs’ remarks as a marker of township English affiliation. Certainly, the absence of explicit connections to gender/ sexual reference in Babs’ spatial story could have been read as an expression of public modesty, deferential speech, and linguistic avoidance, that is, as the appropriate forms of linguistic practice in instances where southern Nguni speakers and their audiences confront the traditionally disquieting discursive terrain of the sexually taboo. This argument positions Babs as the good township citizen, and places Theodora as someone whose linguistic/ discursive practices violate the rules of taboo-related decorum. What I know about Theodora’s personal biography (summarized above) does not suggest such a transgressive profile. While she has moved into the suburbs, she is very careful to return to the township on the weekends, so that her ties of friendship and kinship may be maintained. And as her spatial story confirms, if the shebeen’s owner cannot mediate points of difficulty, she and her friends are willing to leave and move on to another, and hopefully more cordial location. Theodora’s spatial practices seek to avoid disruption, not to create it. Her use of “lesbian” as a form of nomination disrupts Southern Nguni sexual taboos about sexual self-presentation, the disruption also includes a work of repair: Had she used Afrikaans terms, or invoked vocabulary from vernacular township discourse, or made up terms following the word-building patterns that guide new word creation in instances of taboo’d speech, Theodora’s word choice would display a semiotic of insistence: Her same-sex desire deserves public recognition in township sexual discourse. Theodore’s biography, like her social practices on weekend and her linguistic practices in spatial story-telling (and din the events those stories detail) indicate otherwise: We aren’t against the other people who are drinking there. It is just the straight people who have problems with us. (1.103-104) And while the tactics she and her friend employ are different, Theodora entirely agrees with how Babs responds to such conditions: “That is why I say, your safety is in your hands” (2.207-208.) 7 Conclusions: Discourse, Taboo, Intersectionalities This discussion of discourse and taboo has focused on linguistic and social practices of two women. I could have offered a broader profile of taboo-related spatial syntax by examining more women’s stories or introducing men’s as well as women’s narratives. But my purpose here was to address the intersectionalities linking linguistic practice with mobility and relative affluence, desire, and (be)longing, and thereby linking mediating the tensions 256 William L. Leap (Washington D. C.) between taboo’d message and the obligations of citizenship. Intersectionalities are not static formations, Vološinov reminds us: “Existence reflected in sign is not merely reflected but refracted [. . .]” such that “[. . .] differently oriented accents intersect in every occurrence of the ideological sign” (Vološinov 1973: 23.) Vološinov refers to “sign [. . .] as an arena of the class struggle” (1972: 23) in those remarks, but his comments apply to related domains where social practices are shaped by ongoing political/ ideological dispute. The regulatory practices circulating around the “sign” taboo certainly qualify here. As this paper has shown, the lived experience of taboo may be consistent with the particulars of the single subject’s social, linguistic and personal biography, but for that reason, still unfolds unevenly. Rather than limiting discussions of taboo to discourses of prohibition and restraint, or simply augment them with discussions of creativity, I find it useful to study taboo by asking how some social subjects benefit - or struggle to create benefit - from prohibitions and restraints that might otherwise place them at disadvantage. An intersectionalities framework offers useful guidelines for the semiotic inquiry that such an analysis requires. 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